“You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen”: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma Literature

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore possible correlations between literature of Holocaust, widely defined, and recent works about genocide, mass-murder, and atrocity in Africa. It will focus on number of texts that concern both Rwandan genocide (Gil Courtemanche's novel/memoir Sunday at Pool in Kigali [2003] and Paul Rusesabagina's memoir An Ordinary Man [2006]) and victims of numerous conflicts on continent (Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation [2005], Dave Eggers's What Is What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng [2006], and Ismael Beah's Long Way Gone [2007]). However, as both initial hypothetical linkage and object of discussion (African trauma literature) are problematic concepts, I will offer an introductory account of how and why this might be fruitful comparison. The and Postcolonial In his study of discourse of Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes that Strafexpedition [punitive expedition] is first term which I recognised as being specifically National Socialist.... For me word Strafexpedition was embodiment of brutal arrogance and contempt for people who are in any way different, it sounded so colonial, you could see encircled Negro village, you could hear cracking of hippopotamus whip. Later, but unfortunately not for very long, this memory had something comforting about it despite all bitterness. A mild dose of castor oil. (43) In this fragment, two things become proleptically clear for future understanding of and twentieth-century history. The first--it sounded so colonial--is complex interweaving between discourses of empire and colonialism on one hand and discourses of Third Reich and on other. The second--A mild dose ...--is immediate diminution of these complex interweaving histories. Working though what Dirk Moses calls conceptual blockages as well as issues of prejudice and layers of collective memory, historians, cultural thinkers, and philosophers are now turning with more interest to exploring complex and contentious relationship between Holocaust, colonialism, and genocide; and they are finding this relationship more than a mild dose.' Mark Mazower, for example, notes how Hitler's imagination was caught by example of British in India. Their model of imperial rule, such as he conceived it, struck him as admirable ... for him Ukraine was 'that new Indian Empire': Eastern Front would become Germany's North-West frontier (150). Yet those who develop these historiographical congruencies tread delicate path. As Jurgen Zimmerer and others point out, they should try to avoid using as paradigm or benchmark for genocide and atrocity: yet, as Moses's account of recent historical research suggests, this is very hard. He cites historians of Armenian and Cambodian genocides who use as heuristic device and others who develop concepts of cumulative radicalization, race branding (The Holocaust 547-49), and more diffuse and complex links between violence, modernity, and state building, all drawing from study of Holocaust. Other approaches trace impact of colonial policy, or wider European imperial discourses, on development of genocidal operations of Reich. And others, too, explore contrasts between different genocides. Despite desire not to let small number of examples from Europe, taken without context, set agenda, pull of is sometimes simply too strong. Those making these comparisons must also avoid opposite risk of collapsing into history of colonialism contra Aime Cesaire's famous comment on Nazism: the people of Europe tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them ... because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples (14). …